> When asked to choose between whether the federal government should provide “help for American workers who lose their jobs to AI” or create “incentives for American tech companies to keep innovating so that America outcompetes the rest of the world in developing AI, even if it allows tech companies to profit while eliminating jobs in the US,” the public overwhelmingly favored workers.
This is one of the most loaded poll questions I've ever seen. Even if you're very pro worker and anti-AI, I can't see how his poll result is useful outside of generating clickbait headlines.
> They could require government ID to sign up and an adult sponsor to certify accounts for kids.
Even if they used an open source zero knowledge proof, HN will still immediately dismiss it as an attempt to steal your data. The proposal here and the similar bill that passed in California doesn't require any validation that you enter you age correctly.
People are making way too big a deal of this IMO. This is basically the OS equivalent of that checkbox you click to enter a porn website that gets exposed to Meta, so they can claim that they did what they all the they could to protect children if they get sued by parents. Any determined kid would figure out a way around this, but I can see it stopping younger and less determined kids, and it's a useful tool for parents.
It does not stop at the check box. Someone is going to sue Google/Apple when a 13 year old gets on a porn site. Then Google/Apple will introduce "verification" that requires linking your identity to your device, and attesting this to the "operator" (porn site). Then every person using any OS is tracked, on every website and app, all the time, by law. And Linux becomes illegal without it.
This is not a theory. Laws requiring this are going through the state and federal level right now.
Unlike the California law, I seemed to be in the minority in this opinion, this one does seem to require programs like grep to ask for a users age bracket.
> (b) An operator shall request a signal with respect to a
particular user from an operating system provider or a covered
application store when the application is downloaded and
launched.
Unlike the California law I do not see anything that restricts this to child accounts only.
So let say I have a program:
print("Hello, World!")
and I want to publish it to say npm or nixos, or some linux distribution. Not with out violating this law. This application needs to request the users age brackets at least at 'downloaded and launched' optimistically that means once on first launch, but potentially needs to be requested on each launch of the application. So lets fix the program
Microsoft has already made the installation of Windows a fucking nightmare with MS account requirements. Imagine when they are forcing every new device to not only have 50+ TOPS for Copilot, but also a tiny little internal mass spectrometer autosampler which will prick your finger as you login and analyze blood to carbon date the age of the user.
Install offline, no ms cloud bullshit account required. I just did this with Win 11 enterprise 25h2. Used an activator cmd script at the end that bypassed activation.
Most insurance is funded by employers who would switch insurers if they feel they're getting screwed by them.
> So insurance companies spend more so they can collect higher premiums.
This part is still true though. Insurers want you to consume more healthcare, so they'll happily pay for your chiropractor, acupuncturist, acne treatment, and Chanel gift bag [1]. Patients are happy with their benefits. Employers are happy with increasing employee retention in a tax advantaged way. Insurers are happy with the profit. Of course, you aren't going to see much health improvement from this though.
> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.
Believe it or not, this is how lawmaking is supposed to work in a democracy. No one in a position of power is going to be completely selfless. The Civil Rights Acts were only able to pass because NAACP promised to endorse the Republicans and Southern Democrats who were the deciding votes. Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it. For example, in the first half of the Biden administration, there was a real possibility for a minimum wage increase, but voters saw any compromise to the $15 target as weakness even though they depended the vote of Joe Manchin, a Senator of a poor state that would suffer from economic turmoil with a California level minimum wage.
To be clear, it's not fair that the rich and powerful are better equipped to influence lawmaking. However, that's mainly a consequence of the utility of money and power rather than the system being fundamentally broken. Dismissing things like lobbying as corruption may provide comfortable explanation of why you're losing, but only helps the rich and powerful by eroding interest in grassroots lobbying and normalizing actual corruption (e.g. Binance insisting that its $2 billion investment be settled in Trump's stablecoin shortly after CZ was pardoned).
> Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it.
This is a very succinct description of arguably the biggest problem of our democracy right now.
A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt, to inoculate himself from criticism for the very overt acts of corruption he engages in.
Many people seem to support him under the argument “they’re all corrupt, at least he’s not pretending to NOT be corrupt.”
> A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt...
Trump didn't have to convince anyone of that. Voters already believed that, and have for some time. Trump merely had to speak to that widespread, preexisting belief.
The Internet thinks that lobbying is bribery. If you wanted a bribery like vehicle, you'd just donate to a PAC or more recently, the new ballroom. Lobbying is just paying people to speak to politicians. After a company has said everything that wanted to every politician that can possibly support their cause, there isn't anything left for them to do.
Am I the only person who recognized that this bill explicitly does not require any sort of id verification? The point is to make apps and websites more accountable.
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything,
This is clearly propaganda manufactured by the evil tech cabal to suppress grassroots efforts to protect children from their brainwashing. /s
In all seriousness, populist outrage doesn't help anyone except for the power brokers who can hide their true intentions under all the noise. As much of an overreach I think the Patriot Act was for example, the degree of harm that resulted from it is minuscule compared to the brainrot caused by social media. If you want me to oppose the age verification laws, then you need to convince me that those laws won't actually reduce brainrot or that surveillance harms me more than I think and let me come to my own conclusion.
Even if you ignore the climate impact, fossil fuels pollution causes millions of premature deaths a year, and unlike with global warming, that effect is localized. That alone should be reason to transition off of fossil fuels, especially coal which is the dirtiest.
Just to play Devil's advocate here, [approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.
Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.
For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.
This is one of the most loaded poll questions I've ever seen. Even if you're very pro worker and anti-AI, I can't see how his poll result is useful outside of generating clickbait headlines.